1. Technical Field
This invention relates in general to food packaging equipment and, more particularly, to equipment for sorting buns into lanes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Commercial bakeries use high-speed packaging equipment to bag hamburger rolls, hot dog rolls, and other bread products (collectively, “buns”). Typically, the buns are packaged in arrays of one or more layers; for example, a sixteen bun package may package the buns in a four-by-four array and a 32 bun package may package the buns in two four-by-four layers.
In order to arrange the rolls in an array, a bun laner is used. The bun laner takes randomly arranged buns on a conveyer and aligns the buns into rows or “lanes”. When a sufficient number of buns are in each lane, a group is transported to a packaging machine.
Unfortunately, the randomly arranged buns do not evenly fill the lanes under normal circumstances. If a certain lane is not being filled as quickly as the other lanes, then the packaging machine must wait, slowing the packing process. Accordingly, the bun laner generally requires human intervention to direct the buns to the lanes evenly. Manual supervision of the machines, of course, increases the cost of packaging the buns and wastes human resources on a tedious chore.
Therefore, a need has arisen for a bun laner that does not require human supervision.